Thursday, 13 June 2013

Boy George, i-D and the 80s for V&A Magazine

Ahead of the V&A's From Club To Catwalk exhibition - which I previewed for The Huffington Post UK HERE - the V&A has commissioned i-D founder Terry Jones to design the cover of their official magazine.

Paying homage to the 80s, the cover is a mash-up of the i-D archives, which Jones explains below:

“I wanted to make a cover with found images from the i-D archive pasted down pre-computer style, while introducing amorphic distortion with the slice of Boy George running onto the spine. I found the 35mm slide [slide on green background] attached to hand written answers from a Q+A with Hiroshi Fujiwara and his friend; it was published in a story from Tokyo in i-D in the late 80s, before he was well known. George was styled by the legendary Judy Blame and photographed by Johnny Rozsa for The Plain English Issue in 1987. The contact sheet [green] was from queen of green, Katharine Hamnett’s 1985 show; I used a still from this for her DPS ad. Just switched the colour mark-up to clash with our favourite fluro-pink [right strip], where I used the Not Another Punk Book cover as a background for the DIY slide. The ‘D-i-Y’ graphic [bottom] was taken from The Inside Out Issue, 1984. Hand made reconstructed/ deconstructed.”

I don't know about you, but when I look at his cover design above, I just go all 'Culture Club' and get the urge to watch what is quite possibly one of the worst videos of all time - "Victims", which sees Boy George dressed like he's channelling the evil child catcher in Chitty Chitty BangBang mixed with someone who just fell into a fancy dress shop bargain bucket. Enjoy!

The V&A's 'Club to Catwalk: London Fashion in the 1980s' runs from 10th July 2013 – 16th February 2014.